ON GAELIC GAMES:AND THAT was 2011, jetting by and trailing black and amber vapour. There is something of the Sparta about Kilkenny, a frugal, ascetic warrior state dedicated to the cause of honouring the county's traditions.

Sickly boys may not be cast out at birth – in fairness not even footballers are – but generations of young lads march out with their sticks ready to take their place in the ranks of well-drilled hurlers.

A year ago supporters might have felt that the team, having fallen just short of recording an unprecedented five-in-a-row All-Ireland sequence, owed the county little enough but the last place that such misty-eyed concession would have found acceptance would have been within the dressingroom – that “sacred place”, according to manager Brian Cody.

Tipperary’s year as champions sped by and they were always going to be the ultimate target when it came time for Kilkenny to expiate that disappointment and frustration.

It does seem difficult for a team to hold that precise state of all-consuming hunger while champions. It’s one of the remarkable things about Kilkenny that they, like the Kerry footballers of three decades previously, can consistently summon up the desire for titles.

In 2009 Tipperary presented the biggest challenge of the four-in-a-row sequence at the very end but Kilkenny rode it out, even if the citadel eventually fell 12 months later.

After just one year as champions, Tipperary experienced difficulties in relocating the swirling energies of their winning performance. Interestingly an observer at one of their recent practice matches felt that the intensity wasn’t anything like as explosive as the previous year’s.

Kilkenny on the other hand were operating on a higher voltage. Restored to full health – will the 2010 final be catalogued with 1973 when injuries contributed to the defeat by Limerick, avenged a year later but without which they might previously have had a four-in-a-row? – they showed application, awareness and the ferocity that always hallmarks their best displays.

It was disappointing for the deposed champions to lose their title but it was worse to give such a timid account of themselves, unlike in ’09 when they left everything on the field. That they managed to cut the deficit to three points with five minutes to go without ever playing terribly well or even meriting such a tight margin presumably deepens the unhappiness.

Of broader concern is the general health of the game at the top level. Eras of great teams often aren’t that interesting for contemporaries – as indicated by attendances at most of Kerry’s semi-finals in the 1970s and ’80s – but in that respect the age of Kilkenny has been quite successful.

Yet the attraction of the game remains an issue. There were private concerns in the early stages of development that Croke Park would be too big a venue for hurling All-Irelands.

Perhaps it is surprising that such an attractive pairing as the weekend’s appeared to struggle to pack them in; anecdotally there were tales of readily available tickets and the attendance was only a few hundred down on last year but nearly 1,000 short of capacity.

The previous two years’ finals had been immensely exciting and there was an evident appetite for a third meeting. So why did it turn out to be a harder sell?

Competition plays an obvious role in this. New contenders create heightened interest. For all the restrictive practices of football (Tyrone and Kerry dividing up seven of the past eight All-Irelands) there hasn’t been the same pairing two years running in an All-Ireland football decider for nearly a quarter of a century. Even the richest diet can’t be maintained for too long and followers tend to become restless.

There is also the cost factor. The GAA received flak for hiking the final ticket price by €10 to €80. This was always on the cards once the decision was made to drop ticket prices for all of the other All-Ireland rounds and to recoup some of the lost revenues at the final.

Eaten bread is soon forgotten and whereas the idea might have made sense at the time there was always going to be grumbling when the balancing payments came to be made. Walking the line between recognising the need to ease the burden on supporters and maintaining revenue streams from the championship is a tricky task for the GAA, especially with all public funds having dried up. It’s unlikely the additional €10 put off that many. There is, however, a severe recession and a family of four going to the final must also pay for fuel and food, making the experience costly. For the same counties – and this was Kilkenny’s seventh straight final – in their third year, perhaps something had to give.

Furthermore hurling finals have always had a looser grip on capacities than their football equivalent. This isn’t too surprising given the game’s more restricted catchment but in the heady days of the 1990s and even the qualifier era that followed, attendances at finals more or less kept pace football – falling significantly (1,500-plus) behind in just three years of the past 15 (2000, ’01 and ’04) and not counting the “tickets in a drawer” fiasco of 2002, which shaved nearly 3,000 off the crowd at the Kilkenny-Clare final.

This lower ceiling makes it accordingly more difficult to spin out the season in the contemporary manner. It’s easy to forget how skeletal an existence the hurling championship had up until the boom years of the 1990s.

Galway’s emergence gave at least a three-province range to likely champions but previously the All-Ireland was effectively and often actually played out between the Leinster and Munster champions. Only with the qualifiers did hurling get two stand-alone All-Ireland semi-finals.

Football’s 32-county appeal has made that qualifier system a great success but its impact has been more muted in hurling. Six All-Ireland champions have come through the qualifiers in football during the first 10 years; the figure for hurling is just two.

There are other divergent experiences. All four divisions of the football league are competitive at senior championship level and it’s not unusual for counties to beat higher ranked teams. Hurling has a super-stratum within its elite and there are virtually no shocks in the championship.

The format enables teams to set aside bad championship experiences, as both All-Ireland semi-finalists did last month, and allows them slip out of the traditional headlock in which oppressor counties may grip them – Dublin’s display against Kilkenny in the Leinster final was comfortably their worst (“they had us beaten in the parade,” was manager Anthony Daly’s pithy description) – but it doesn’t open up the championship in the same way as operates in football.

All concerns aside, the year ends again with the focus on Kilkenny. In time we’ll still be talking about them and with even clearer perspective on their defiant achievements.